Hot Topics:

Peter Lucas: Fear and loathing of the privileged class

The mainstream media, like the entrenched Washington political establishment, is becoming increasingly unhinged over the possibility -- once remote -- that Donald Trump could become president.

The panicked reporters and commentators are like the scribes in ancient Rome in the year 410 when the barbarians were at the gate, threatening their pampered and privileged lives.

Nothing was the same for them and for the political elite after Rome fell. The rulers became the ruled. And nothing will be the same for the ruling political and media elite in the U.S. either if Washington falls to Trump as well.

The difference between then and now is that unlike Alaric and the Visigoths, Trump is not out to destroy the city, as the barbarians did, but has vowed to make it great again.

But he has to get elected first. And to do so, he has to overcome an open and shameful nodding conspiracy among members of the media, on the left as well as on the right, to destroy him.

Entrenched Washington fears nothing more than an outsider who is promising to tear their privileged lives apart. This includes the lives of bought-and-paid-for connected members of what Victor David Hanson calls the media/political, academic/celebrity class that rules our lives.

How bad is the media?

Veteran reporter/columnist Michael Goodwin of the New York Post put it this way: "The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media (to bury Trump) is unlike anything seen in modern America.

Advertisement

The largest broadcast networks -- CBS, NBC and ABC -- and major newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play.

"Indeed, no foreign enemy, no terror group, no native criminal gang suffers the daily beating that Trump does. The mad mullahs of Iran, who call America the Great Satan and vow to wipe Israel off the map, are treated gently by comparison."

But it is worse than that. Not only has the media set out to destroy Trump, it has also attacked and ridiculed the millions of Americans who voted for him in the primaries and who will again vote for him in November.

Syndicated columnist George Will, an entrenched politically connected conservative and Fox News panelist, called Trump supporters "unprecedentedly and incorrigibly vulgar." Will did not mention in that column that his wife, Mari Maseng Will, an established Washington GOP operative, was a key campaign adviser to presidential candidate Gov. Scott Walker, a Trump opponent. After Trump won the party endorsement, Will announced that he was leaving the Republican Party, as though anybody cared.

Last week, coming from the Democratic left, syndicated columnist and television commentator Cokie Roberts, another well-connected Washington insider, said people who support Trump were "morally tainted" because Trump is allegedly a racist.

She said she knew what she was talking about because "I grew up in the Jim Crow South."

Roberts, like Will and many others in the media, grew up in Washington, D.C., not in the Jim Crow South. It is true that she was born in New Orleans, a district her father represented in the U.S. House. But she went to school in Washington, where she graduated from high school before attending Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

You could not find a more connected Washington political insider than Cokie Roberts, who is married to veteran Washington reporter Steven Roberts. Her father, Hale Boggs, was a Democratic member of the U.S. House for 28 years. He was the majority leader and in line to become speaker of the House when he was killed in a mysterious plane crash in Alaska in 1972.

No wreckage or bodies were ever found, despite several massive searches. His death paved the way for U.S. Rep. Thomas P. O'Neill of Cambridge to become speaker.

Without skipping a beat, Boggs' wife, Lindy Boggs, was elected to replace her late husband and went on to serve in the House for another 18 years, which means that the Boggses held the Louisiana House seat for 46 years.

Their son, Thomas Hale Boggs Jr., before he died in 2014, not only became a successful and rich Washington lobbyist, but because of his political connections, was known as the "king" of all the lobbyists. One of his biggest lobbying successes was passage of the 1979 federal bailout of Chrysler, his client. Reporter Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame wrote a profile of him in Vanity Fair that was called "King of the Hill."

This is just a small example of what Trump is running against. And Trump just might win.

Now wonder there is fear and loathing in Washington.

Peter Lucas' political column appears Tuesday and Friday. Email him at luke1825@aol.com.

Welcome to your discussion forum: Sign in with a Disqus account or your social networking account for your comment to be posted immediately, provided it meets the guidelines. (READ HOW.)
Comments made here are the sole responsibility of the person posting them; these comments do not reflect the opinion of The Sun. So keep it civil.